R.L.'s Houseboat On the Styx

12:10am: INTRO -- SCROLL DOWN TO CURRENT ENTRIES
This blog is mostly about fiction techiques, terms from how-to-write books, etc. (Constructive debate is welcome, but anti-geeky stuff may be moved to the basement.)

The "Great Chain of Reading" that Gergely Nagy discusses

( MISC WRITING GEEKY LINKS )

5:32pm: While I'm signal-boosting, here are some sites which are links at Ysabet's http://ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com/865203.html

Here is a listing of web novels on a 5-star scale, best to worst, with indication of whether they are complete or ongoing.

This site rates weblit by popularity based on votes.

Fiction on the Web is based in the UK, and includes resources, reviews, and other interesting stuff.

Web Fiction Directory lists short fiction, flash, and serialized novels.

9:31pm: Circumnavigating Fairyland -- a self-webbed book for Norton Award!
Signal boost for Cat Valente's page:
http://yuki-onna.livejournal.com/546905.html

Fairyland is eligible for the Andre Norton Award.

[W]ouldn't it be cool for something this independent, this unique and tribal and viral, to be nominated for one of the big awards in the field? Wouldn't it be cool to shake things up, to show that this kind of thing, if the quality is good enough, can be considered alongside shiny hardback bestsellers?

The book is complete and can be read in its entirety [at
http://www.catherynnemvalente.com/fairyland/ ] for free.

( Read more... )

10:40am: Here is a brilliant post by Zornhau.
http://zornhau.livejournal.com/187722.html
The whole thing is very worth reading, but here's the gist:

On the forums, you see novice writers who've got this far: “OMG! The rules are a lie!”
From time to time, a seasoned pro responds that anything goes, if it works. This is true, but not necessarily useful. [....]
Think of a story as a transcript of a game played out between two or more opposing people, forces, themes... whatever. A watchable game of any sort has comprehensible rules, is between evenly matched opponents, or interestingly mismatched ones, is dynamic, and is packed with reversals. What if the same applies to a good story?
Now we can see how to use supposed bloopers [ie Mary Sues, infodumps, etc] properly.

9:54pm: 'spinster' -- someone asked the meaning
'Spinster' originally meant a woman who spins thread for a living (as a cottage industry, with her own spinning wheel). By later extension, a 'career woman'.

Often also a 'bluestocking.'

Marriage wise, 'spinster' meant an unmarried woman (thus she had time and need to earn her own living), presumably past the usual age of marriage and settled into the 'old maid' role more or less permanently.

'Spinster' not used of a widow sfiar.

Spinster or widow or wife could be a battleaxe. Spinsters might get that way younger. 'Old battleaxe' was common, but 'young battleaxe' would be understandable and believable.

Old maids could also be very sweet and helpless, often reuinted with their lost suitors in the last chapter. Spinsters were capable, independent, often proud, often slightly astringent, reunited or late-finding romance after some friction. Widows were capable and unromantic unless old and lorn and lonesome, or unless their lost husbands were going to turn up in the last chapter.

I posted this as a comment at http://sanguinity.livejournal.com/513349.html?view=2994245#t2994245

10:47am: For Lewis fans about the 'bonfire.'
How large a 'bonfire'? ;-) Discussion of how many species could fit in Noah's Ark at least begins from some exact specs for its size.

Here is a quote from Lewis's stepson Doug Gresham showing how that household used the word 'bonfire'.

( Read more... )

12:51pm: Now here is what I unfashionably call good description -- 'passive' voice and inversion and all. Well, I guess I could spare the majestic barques of the seven seas.


Far from the shore stands the gray lighthouse, above sunken slimy rocks that are seen when the tide is low, but unseen when the tide is high. Past that beacon for a century have swept the majestic barques of the seven seas. In the days of my grandfather there were many; in the days of my father not so many; and now there are so few that I sometimes feel strangely alone, as though I were the last man on our planet. -- HP Lovecraft, "The White Ship"


The words and their order focuses your EYES for far, and moves them steadily offshore, with an up and down pause at the rocks, then past into physical distance, then into time distance. then into fantasy.

11:56pm: Will Shetterly "diving into epubbing" posts useful links.
http://willshetterly.livejournal.com/274435.html

7:59pm: Testing Gender Genie from http://bookblog.net/gender/genie.php.

First, a sample from Kipling of two men talking, a young man and an older advisor; Genie thinks they're female, by 1000 to 670. Well, they're British, and possibly from before civilization fell in 1914. I'll recharge batteries and try again later.

Second test was from Austen's EMMA, a younger woman and an older advisor:. Genie got this right: Female Score: 1787 Male Score: 1213

May not be fair to test outside our own time and continent, but I wanted something quickto find and public domain.


CAPT. M. (Chuckling grimly.) Not by a very long chalk, my son.
You're going through some of the most refined torture you've ever
known. But be calm. I am with you. 'Shun! Dress!

CAPT. G. Eh! Wha-at?

CAPT. M. Do you suppose that you are your own master for the
next twelve hours? If you do, of course-(Makes for the door.)

CAPT. G. No! For Goodness' sake, old man, don't do that! You'll
see through, won't you? I've been mugging up that beastly drill,
and can't remember a line of it.
( Read more... )

10:07am: Before Ralph Lauren, there were...

7:53pm: meme: 10 women poets
Okay, here are the first that occur to me, in no particular order, with some preference to those easier to spell:

Amy Lowell
Anna Hempstead Branch
'A.E.'
Edna St Vincent Millay
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Sappho
Dorothy Parker
Sylvia Plath
ETA: Emily Dickenson
Anon

Perhaps not poets but they should have been:
B.J. Chute
Elinor Wylie
Elizabeth Goudge
Colette
Virginia Woolf
L.M. Montgomery

Does Harriet's sonnet count?
Dorothy Sayers

Not a woman but he should have been:
Christopher Fry

7:35pm: 221B

Here dwell together still two men of note
Who never lived and so can never die:
How very near they seem, yet how remote
That age before the world went all awry.
But still the game's afoot for those with ears
Attuned to catch the distant view-halloo:
England is England yet, for all our fears--
Only those things the heart believes are true.

A yellow fog swirls past the window-pane
As night descends upon this fabled street:
A lonely hansom splashes through the rain,
The ghostly gas lamps fail at twenty feet.
Here, though the world explode, these two survive,
And it is always eighteen ninety-five.

-- Vincent Starrett

2:52pm: Another good writing craft post at Shalanna's
Another good writing craft post at Shalanna's.
http://shalanna.livejournal.com/322639.html?view=flat

( To see the posts treed delete the ?view=flat )

Here are a couple of my comments.
( Read more... )

1:22pm: Ezra Pound in collections
My comment on someone's comment on Ezra Pound:

As for Pound, maybe you have already, but I'd suggest encountering him and a few others in context, in a collection such as Aiken's _Modern American Poetry_ c. 1920. That is, just their poems, mixed in with other poets of the same period (and some Sandburg and Frost for contrast).

It was a crazy time, and imo we're lucky that any of them managed to publish anything, much less the loveliness of HD, Branch, Amy Lowell, Wallace Stevens, Aiken himself.... Or maybe WWI was the kind of craziness that sent the right kind of poets escaping into a dimension of loveliness....

2:11am: wow
Unusual, delightful, nourishing....

http://www.stardancer.org/kherishdar/index.phtml

7:14pm: Bittercon - writing discussions online http://community.livejournal.com/bittercon/
Essays and discussions for people staying home from the convention.

http://community.livejournal.com/bittercon/

12:17pm: Another great writing craft post at http://shalanna.livejournal.com/320281.html?view=1114905&style=mine#t1114905

For those who'd like to keep checking back for new comments, here's a view that shows all comments in chronological order rather than as tree.
http://shalanna.livejournal.com/320281.html?view=flat

Shalanna has good points on several subjects. Here's one of them.


[A sample from an opening:]


"I was closing up shop when the phone rang. I hoped it was Joe, but it was a synthesized voice. It said, 'Stop asking questions or you're dead.'"


[A clueless critiquer] immediately says, "WHO IS JOE? Tell us who Joe is. We need to know RIGHT NOW!"


[The critiquer] doesn't realize that part of what she's supposed to be curious about is who Joe is. It's good to mention your main characters as early on in the narrative or dialogue as you possibly can, and then when the guy comes onstage readers can say, "Aha, Joe! Here he is. We expected him." That's a minor story question, and you don't want to stop the story right away to answer it. If you write, "I hoped it was Joe, our company president," you've taken away some of the curiosity/mystery, slowed the pace of the sentence, and distracted readers from the impact of the threat. That's not a perfect example, but I'll bet you know what I'm talking about. If you've been challenged by critiquers to go back and put in explanations RIGHT AWAY for every little detail or clue you drop, just ignore them. They're wrong.

7:53pm: memory loss caused by high blood pressure!?! who knew?
( Read more... )

9:58pm: Disagreeing with Sir Joseph
( Read more... )

10:47am: mobbing indicators
Mobbing, as defined by Kenneth Westhues in his checklist of mobbing indicators (http://arts.uwaterloo.ca/~kwesthue/checklist.htm) (2006) developed to combat mobbing in academic contexts.
( Read more... )

10:23pm: Passing this along:

12:32 Iran Security is hunting for bloggers using location and timezone searches. If we all
become 'Iranians' it becomes much harder to find them. #

12:32 Do this by setting your location to Tehran and your timezone to +3.5 Tehran in your
Twitter Settings. Please RT these two messages

1:34pm: The Girl who Circumnavigated Fairyland
See http://yuki-onna.livejournal.com/487082.html

scroll down to the action.

3:02pm: Jane Austen without the French Revolution
Personally, I think it's a Good Thing to be capable of reading Jane Austen without thinking about the French Revolution and why she didn't write about it and what she is a product of etc etc.

Open thread....

6:45pm: The Thirteenth Child flap
My comments, in random order, subject to update....

This book is a fantasy. I wonder if its denouncers have read Wrede's ENCHANTED FOREST series. They might complain that dragons are not real, that the social order of castles and princesses and heroes is not supported by actual history....

Thirteenth Child is not serious 'alternate history' either. 
 

This is not a book like Walton's FARTHING, whose basc effect is a dark mirroring of our world, 1 for 1. CHILD is a different world to be read as standing alone, without needing to mirror anything.

Stereotypes. Firefly/Serenity used plot and character stereotypes. It wasn't realistic either: a space ship with skillets dangling on the kitchen wall? It was ABOUT stereotypes. So is CHILD, to some extent (as was ENCHANTED FOREST).

Walton described CHILD (qfm -- I'm quoting from memory) as LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE with mammoths and magic. Elsewhere Walton described her own TOOTH AND CLAW as (qfm) FRAMLEY PARSONAGE with dragons. Maybe they would fault that for unrealism too.

Thirteenth Child is fiction, fantasy fiction, in a fantasy world.


Here is what's posted at Patricia's website:

"Eff Rothmer is the twin sister of a seventh son 
of a seventh son, growing up on the edge of 
the "safe" settled area of the U.S. in the 
1850s (though history has not gone quite the 
way it did in our world-the Civil War, for 
instance, happened in 1832, and Lewis and 
Clark never came back...)

This is the first book of a fantasy trilogy about 
settling the West in a world where magic 
works and the New World was not settled until 
modern magic (of Columbus' day) made it 
possible to fend off the dangerous wildlife 
(which includes both imaginary beasts like 
steam dragons and spectral bears, and real-life 
post-ice-age creatures like wooly mammoths)."

Wrede said of the world of THIRTEENTH CHILD:

 "The prehistoric people who, in our world, emigrated across the land bridge and through the Arctic Circle didn’t even try to get past the ice dragons; their descendants are all still back on the eastern Pacific rim, and the history of Asia is far less recognizable than that of the Mediterranian area. Unfortunately, my narrator is not particularly interested in global history or politics, so most of that is only present in the text by implication." 
 

 (One detractor said that in that case Wrede should have set the book in Asia and made it about the Asians instead!)

1:16pm: why I love Ozarque's blog!
http://ozarque.livejournal.com/471118.html